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From Wilderness, to Wilderness

This video segment from Nature: Radioactive Wolves examines the evolution of part of the Pripyat Marshes under Soviet rule from wetland wilderness to agricultural and nuclear powerhouse and back again, after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. In the 1920s, a massive national project began that included area deforestation and the draining of the Pripyat Marshes. Canals were constructed and the area became a major food producer for the Soviet Union. However, following the nuclear reactor meltdown, wilderness has reclaimed the area.

This video is available in both English and Spanish audio, along with corresponding closed captions.

The Pripyat Marshes is the vast “inland delta” of the Pripyat River and its tributaries covering approximately 100,000 square miles of the Eastern European nations of Belarus and Ukraine. The landscape of swampy rivers, sandy floodplains, and dense forests has never been particularly hospitable to human habitation. It was for centuries a largely impassable wilderness and a major strategic obstacle for invaders ranging from Ghenghis Khan to Hitler.

In the 1870s, when the marshes fell within Tsarist Russia’s borders, the first attempts were made to drain the land and put it to agricultural use. These efforts were revived with considerably greater fervor in the 1920s, with the establishment of the Soviet Union and its aggressive Five Year Plans to modernize and expand the Soviet economy. This “land improvement” involved clearing vast swathes of forest, damming rivers into reservoirs, and digging thousands of miles of canals. Thousands of settlers were brought in to work on newly established government-owned “collective farms,” where they worked together to help grow and harvest the rye, barley, wheat, and flax which made Ukraine the “breadbasket of the Soviet Union.”

While making parts of the Pripyat Marshes much more habitable and productive for the Soviets, land improvement destroyed much of the natural wetland ecosystem which had once thrived there. The elk, wolves, foxes, and other game animals which survived were aggressively hunted, as were beavers, considered vermin because their dams obstructed canals.

Even after the agricultural settlement of the southern Pripyat Marshes, the overall human population there remained relatively sparse. This, combined with the availability of water from the Pripyat River, determined the government’s decision in 1970 to build the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant on the river, along with an adjoining city of modern steel and concrete called Pripyat to house the plant’s workers.

Pripyat was evacuated on April 27, 1986—the day after the accident at Chernobyl. Told only to bring the bare necessities, Pripyat’s residents would never return, leaving the city an eerie time capsule of that day. The sudden death of nearby pines in what would become known as “The Red Forest” seemed to confirm fears that nuclear contamination would render the area a desert. An “Exclusion Zone” was established around Chernobyl, cordoning off the area of greatest radioactivity from everyone but official government workers.

Nature in the Exclusion Zone has proven far more resilient than expected. Suddenly and completely free of the humans who had hunted them for centuries and destroyed so much of their natural habitat, and despite lingering levels of radioactivity that would be unacceptable for humans, wildlife has flourished. With it has come a gradual return of the land itself to its natural, pre-“improvement” state. Forests are overgrowing abandoned cities and beavers are busily damming rivers and canals, returning hard-won agricultural land to swampy marsh and reestablishing the complex wetlands ecosystem which once thrived there. Much like the Chernobyl disaster itself, the new wilderness of the Exclusion Zone is a stark reminder of human limitations.

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